#13 — Fishing for Harmonies: Kindling Research Cultures of Conviviality with Dr Andy Letcher

<p>In the 13th episode of the Iboga Leadership Summit podcast, Ros Stone speaks with Dr Andy Letcher; author of <i>Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom</i>, scholar of religion, folk musician, druid, and Programme Director of the MSc Psychedelics at <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research-centres/psychedelic-interdisciplinary-centre/" target="_blank">EPIC</a> (the Exeter Psychedelic Interdisciplinary Centre); for a conversation about the limits of translation, the politics of psychedelic knowledge, and how the Global North can get better at listening.<br /></p><p>Andy traces a path that began in ecology before crossing into the humanities: a third-year undergraduate confronted by the history and philosophy of science, a PhD candidate who set out to vindicate Druidry and emerged a reluctant atheist, and eventually a scholar who found himself having to reassemble his beliefs from the ground up. <br /><br />He speaks with precision about the intellectual habits that separate disciplines, and makes the case that psychedelic research needs both science and the humanities; but in the spirit of genuine, convivial conversation, with assumptions made visible and reality tunnels widened.<br /></p><p>Andy shares the story of his encounter with Iboga and relates the intrinsicality of the music to the resolution of his journey: field recordings of Bwiti music allowed him to experience a sense of the all-pervasive “wonder of song.”<br /></p><p>The conversation also approaches some of the thornier questions that he has has spent his career circling: what happens when a tradition is transplanted or extracted, and why the hunger for an ancient Indigenous tradition of one's own, however understandable, may be pointing in the wrong direction.<br /></p><p><i>"Authenticity doesn't reside in the distant past. It doesn't necessarily reside in other parts of the world. The authenticity resides between us and the mushroom, or us and the plants that we use, and our relationship to the non-human."</i><br /></p><p>Andy reflects on the morphic resonance kindled by gathering, and on how this can be built when we come together in embodied practice rather than solely attempting to access spiritual ideas that are mediated through text (including our calendars). <br /><br />He also notes the particular urgency of hearing Gabonese and African voices more widely within the global psychedelic academic conversation, noting that this has long or